HBR explains how judgement underperforms simple algorithms for many issues – strategy algorithms exist, at least implicitly. Recent decades have seen human intuition progressively replaced with proven rules, procedures or algorithms for increasingly complex tasks. Long ago, truck deliveries were scheduled by the logistics manager, and airline prices set by pricing staff…

This blog post from HBS starts well, but ends in the wrong place, saying we shouldn’t try to quantify intangible issues. We do know how to deal quantitatively with such factors. We can handle both tangible qualities that differ between people, such as differing customer sales rates, and also intangible states-of-mind.…

HBR asks How to Jump-Start the Clean-Tech Economy and points out that initially-inferior technologies penetrate markets all the time. It also notes that inventing a new product alone may not be enough – a complete system may have to be initiated. There’s more we know though, that Govt and firms could…

HBR is dusting off some old but useful articles in this collection Maximize Your Strategy.   

An otherwise great column in HBR It’s Time for the 3-D MBA about improving MBA programs starts well by urging more breadth and depth, then calling for more ‘dynamics’ than static prespectives. [I’d hardly disagree with that!]. But it then asserts that “The vast majority of value created in business…

… and right after the McKinsey survey, HBR has an article by Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead (Ashridge) and Sydney Finkelstein (Dartmouth) on neuroscience revelations about how leaders’ judgment gets distorted. It seems we have systematic biases, then land on initial conclusions we are reluctant to change, and the article offers…